Tomato Pizza Recipes

This is my interpretation of Pizz'a Chicago's Joliet Jake. The pizzas are named after Chicago landmarks and notable personalities, and are made with a wide range of ingredients. The Joliet Jake is a vegetarian pizza which consists of four varieties of mushrooms: shiitake, Portobello, crimini and button with shredded mozzarella cheese, dried apricots and fresh basil.

I tried to stay true to the Chicago-style deep dish pizza and baked the pizza in a non-stick round pan until the top was golden, the cheese bubbly and the crust golden brown, then served it while still piping hot.

My husband Lulu just bought the new Breville convection toaster oven. The first thing that came out of his mouth when we opened the box was, "We have to inaugurate the oven by using that pizza setting." The next day, I bought ready-made garlic and herb pizza dough and got very excited about trying our new machine.

It didn't take much time for me to come up with a pizza topping selection. It came naturally to make it fairly healthy: a few tablespoons of tomato sauce, a bit of aged Cheddar cheese, baby artichoke hearts, oil-cured black olives, roasted bell peppers and fresh sweet basil. I could have added pine nuts at the end but I wanted to avoid any nut allergies (one family member has them). Needless to say, the oven and pizza were a hit. It took 30 minutes to prepare and bake last night's meal: mission accomplished!

Since I had my daughter, I haven't had a lot of time to cook so I got some ready-made pizza dough from Trader Joe's. instead of using regular tomato sauce I used indian tomato chutney to make the dish more flavorful. I topped it with fried paneer, smoked goat cheddar cheese, mozzarella and parmesan. This is not your average four-cheese pizza!